The Foundry MODO 10 Series is Now Available!

The Foundry MODO 10 Series is Now Available!

The MODO 10 Series is your starting point for creative exploration. The first installment, MODO 10.0v1, offers significantly enhanced workflows for creating real-time content for games, or for other immersive interactive experiences like virtual reality.

Whether you’re creating real-time content for immersive experiences like games or virtual reality; iterating on concepts or crafting final production meshes for product design; using 3D to communicate, visualize or sell an idea; or taking the plunge into film or video production, MODO is your starting point for creative exploration.

The MODO 10 Series delivers valuable new feature sets in a series of three installments, for a single price—you can choose when to upgrade from 902 or earlier or purchase a new seat, and you’ll receive all three installments as they become available. With the MODO 10 Series, you’ll get the tools you need to create top-notch design and entertainment content today—and you’ll be more prepared to tackle tomorrow’s evolving production requirements.

The first installment, MODO 10.0v1, offers significantly enhanced workflows for creating real-time content for games, or for other immersive interactive experiences like virtual reality. Highlights include the ability to author in MODO and be confident that your assets will look virtually the same in Unity or Unreal; a streamlined, repeatable texture baking workflow that takes the pain out of putting realistic detail into your real-time assets; and new ways to export to popular engines featuring simple, automated steps that minimize the need to recreate work.

Key new features in MODO 10.0v1

WYSIWYG look-development workflows

MODO 10 delivers a WYSIWYG look-development experience for games authoring that lets you work in the context of your final delivery platform. Now you can develop and view looks for game art that correspond to lighting and surface details in real-time game engines, with two new physically based material types which closely match the materials in Unreal Engine and Unity; several enhancements to the advanced photorealistic viewport, including support for viewing and exporting the Unity and Unreal-compatible PBR materials; and the ability to work with the Unreal Editor 4 and Unity 5 base shaders directly in MODO.

Enhanced baking

MODO’s baking workflow is now more automated and streamlined. New Bake Items let you store bake-related parameters for reuse, so you can initiate a bake process with different input data, but using exactly the same bake settings as previously. What’s more, when preview and RayGL baking, you can now take settings from a Bake Item, so you can tweak settings and see the results before executing the final operation. To make baking even easier, a new Bake Wizard streamlines the setup of Bake Items and baking, and offers customizable output presets.

Streamlined export to games engines

Now you can transfer assets between MODO and Unity or Unreal Editor 4 with shading information intact, eliminating the need to recreate shading work in the games engine editor. What’s more, exporting to games engines is now single-step operation, thanks to a new preset mechanism with ready-made presets for Unreal and Unity, and the ability to create custom presets to target additional engines. In addition meshes are now automatically triangulated on FBX export—matching MODO’s internal triangulation for GL rendering and ensuring a visual match—and there’s now direct support for a range of common DDS image formats.

Real-time content creation workflows

MODO 10 offers workflows specifically targeted at artists creating content for real-time applications. The Games Tools layout is centered around the everyday tasks of vertex normal editing, texture baking and exporting to game engines, while still providing quick access to modeling tools. In addition, you can now navigate through your MODO scene as you would a video game level, with a new FPS (First Person Shooter) mode that uses the mouse to look around, and the keyboard to move—enabling you to evaluate your scene as a player would see it.

FBX enhancements

Delivering better compatibility for real-time engines, a new FBX 2015 plug-in offers support for the widely-used FBX 2014 format; the ability to export UV sets alphabetically; and automatic application of default (linear) color correction to vector maps in all loaded clips including FBX and other non-LXO formats. What’s more, animation from FBX files can now be imported and merged onto items in the scene, or applied to actors as actions, while instances and replicators can now be exported to FBX.

Enhanced control of normals

Now you can explicitly manipulate vertex normals to control shading smoothness on low-polygon assets, with a series of tools that let you select individual edges to be smoothed or unsmoothed, constructing a vertex normal map on the mesh. What’s more, in addition to generating tangent basis data suitable for use with normal maps in Unreal, we’ve added the ability to create data suitable for use in both Unity and Source.

Enhanced UV and UDIM workflows

A new wizard makes creating UDIM image sets a breeze; UDIM textures can now also be baked like any other texture. In addition, you can now export UVs to the widely-supported XML-based SVG vector graphics format; the feature includes the ability to export a selected of range of UDIMs either spread out or in separate layers. Moreover, the advanced photorealistic viewport can now display multiple UDIM tiles, further improving parity with MODO’s renderer.

Everyday tools made better

MODO 10 continues to improve the tools you use everyday—from modeling, to texturing, to painting, to dynamics, to color selection. For example, the vertex map painting toolset now offers a choice of blend modes, as well as the ability to mask vertex colors by color channel and by polygon selection, and a new option to view each channel in isolation. What’s more, you can now keep your meshes closer in size to the original when using the Smooth Tool, thanks to a new Volume Preservation option.